Future Group to target e-comm giants in series of ads

India’s brick-and-mortar giant Future Group is taking major e-commerce rivals head on. Future Group Founder, Kishore Biyani has decided to target Flipkart, Snapdeal and Amazon in a series of ads and he’s not mincing his words.

Future Group is targeting e-commerce rivals Flipkart, Snapdeal, Amazon and it's not mincing any words

The ads will be playing on the e-commerce giants’ names, twisting them to sound like Flip the Cart, Snap the Deal and Amaz-Off.

This is the first time a brick-and-mortar retailer will engage in comparative advertising against online rivals. The reason behind the offensive is largely being seen as the huge discounts that online retailers offer on products.

And advertising is not the only space where the Future Group is targetting the e-tailers. Store employees will be seen wearing T-shirts with messages like ‘My deal got snapped’ and ‘My cart got flipped’, in what many people are seeing as psychological warfare.

“We just want to prove the point that both our merchandise assortment and pricing are better compared to online companies. We need to make consumers aware of this fact. Brand Factory’s gross merchandise value (GMV) in the year to March 2016 was Rs 3,500 crore. Future is India’s biggest listed retailer,” Biyani was quoted by The Economic Times as saying.

According to a report in The Economic Times: After nearly three years of deep discounting, most online sellers are now pulling back from this strategy in a desperate effort to shore up their finances, making them vulnerable on this front.

The report goes on to state: The combined losses of the three leading online companies — Amazon, Flipkart and Snapdeal — ballooned to Rs 5,052 crore in FY15 from Rs 1,000 crore in the year before as they sought to build market share. At the same time, several brickand-mortar retailers clocked double-digit same-store sales growth last year, a reversal from the trend in 2014 when physical stores reported subdued demand as ecommerce players wooed away consumers.